A genius student? Ha, they're nothing but ants at your feet!

Two o'clock in the morning.

The night wind in Silicon Valley, carrying the damp chill of the Pacific Ocean, tried to penetrate the gaps in the blinds.

Theodore Langford, the genius whom the entire Stanford mathematics department is proud of, is currently sitting expressionlessly in front of his laptop, sporting huge dark circles under his eyes.

On the edge of the messy desk, a coffee cup that had long since run dry stood precariously.

Beside him was an open notebook filled with densely packed, complex calculus equations—the battlefield he had just fought halfway through.

"Next question."

He muttered to himself and slammed his keyboard down.

The dark blue screen flashed suddenly:

[Logia is calculating your ranking points.]

tick-

The progress bar on the screen filled up quickly, and then a matching search prompt popped up.

[Logia is about to begin a new trial for you.]

Difficulty: S+

Success rate: 0.3%

[Would you accept the challenge?]

(Y/N)

Theodore took a deep breath.

If he answers this question correctly, he can firmly hold onto the top spot on the leaderboard for a short period of time, and no one can take him down.

"These guys..."

Theodore's gaze swept over the frantically chasing data.

"Don't you usually have to do anything serious?"

Behind him, his competitors were like a horde of zombies that had smelled blood, frantically climbing the rankings.

Stanford, Princeton, University of Tokyo, ETH Zurich, Cambridge...

The geniuses from the world's top universities have all abandoned all martial ethics and transformed into emotionless problem-solving machines, relentlessly chasing Theodore's ranking points.

But he did not feel the slightest sense of crisis.

"Bring it on, you defeated wretches!"

Click.

Theodore chuckled and clicked the mouse.

The complex charts and dense symbols instantly filled the entire screen.

The questions have finished loading.

Theodore instantly severed all sensory connections with the outside world, his cerebral cortex entering a state of absolute focus and flow; it was time to refocus his attention.

[00: 10: 00]

The countdown in the upper right corner of the screen started ticking.

A question with a ten-minute time limit.

He quickly built a difficulty assessment model in his mind, and it seemed that the difficulty wouldn't be too outrageous.

After all, the truly extremely difficult and challenging problems he had encountered before had a time limit of two full hours!

rustling.

Before long, the system popped up a message accompanied by a sound effect indicating that the answer was correct.

Clean and efficient.

As usual, he completed his daily defensive targets today.

However, looking at the gleaming badge of first place, he felt utterly bored, because the target he truly wanted to challenge remained stubbornly absent.

"Su Hao, you bastard, why aren't you here yet?"

"I've been waiting for you on the throne the whole time! Don't you have any competitive spirit at all?!"

Although the fact that a top Stanford student would become a troll online was a humiliation he found hard to talk about.

But in order to force the other party to come out, he even put aside all his idol image and registered a new account on Reddit, frantically posting anonymous inflammatory threads that were comparable to elementary school students arguing with each other.

"It's infuriating, this guy is such a coward."

Who is Theodore?

He is a recognized rising star in the mathematics world, and is described by senior professors as a "prodigy".

While a sophomore at Stanford University, he proved a differential geometry lemma that had kept his professor studying it for months in just a few days.

That proof was nothing short of a bombshell in the mathematics world.

His proof forcefully advanced Hamilton's "Ricci flow" theory, which is considered a classic in the mathematical community.

Without any lengthy preamble, he used a single, concise equation to completely simplify the complex process of combining differential equations with topological spaces.

From then on, he was as if possessed by a god.

In just two short years!

He published four groundbreaking papers in the world's top academic journals!

Two of them were even chosen by the editor-in-chief as the cover stories for the month!

The entire international academic community has gone crazy.

The fervent praise was overwhelming and incessant.

Among the world's young generation of mathematicians.

Theodore's name is an indescribable, phenomenal totem!

Everyone can only admire him!

Everyone is desperately trying to follow in his footsteps, which are beyond their reach!

Until, a man named Su Hao, with his proof of the "Four Color Theorem" that was enough to drive all his peers to the brink of madness, made a spectacular entrance into the world.

Like a blazing sun, it crushed the light of the stars in the sky!

Damn it.

Theodore turned his head irritably and glanced at the latest issue of an academic journal that he had tossed aside in the corner of his desk with utter disdain.

Even from half a meter away, the extremely eye-catching bold characters on the cover still pierced his retina like a sharp sword.

Five Outstanding Young Mathematicians Leading the Future

Theodore stared intently at that page, his gaze so sharp it could burn through the paper.

[No.1 Su Hao (MIT)]

The editor's note is filled with nauseating flattery:

Faced with this mathematician who is not only young but also still somewhat immature in the long history of academia, who would dare to easily assess the enormous potential of this mathematician?

Even the genius Ilya Cronin, hailed as a demigod, failed to achieve such astonishing success in this ancient discipline at the age of thirteen!

(A thousand words of extremely exaggerated, sycophantic praise are omitted here.)

Despite still holding a ridiculous "undergraduate degree," he is considered a strong contender for the next Fields Medal by several top international academic committees!

Su Hao is a true future leader in the field of mathematics! An absolute, overwhelmingly powerful core asset!

And below this long, lavishly praising text, in an extremely cramped position, finally appears that once-shining name.

[No. 2 Theodore Langford (Stanford University)]

The comments were extremely perfunctory:

As a former king, his genius has not dimmed.

His early research in the field of partial differential equations, which combined Ricci flow with topology, remains overwhelmingly dominant to this day.

So much so that Stanford University's mathematics department, a century-old institution, was once jokingly referred to by its colleagues as "Theodore's department."

(A lot of perfunctory words used to comfort the perennial runner-up are omitted here.)

[Without a doubt, his name will become one of the symbols representing the next generation of mathematicians.]

Even a blind man could see it!

One is the "absolute core trump card".

The other one, however, has become "one of the symbols"!

Anyone can see the condescending and pitying bias in this evaluation.

Theodore clenched his teeth, feeling as if his self-esteem was being trampled on.

"Even if I've recently encountered a tiny, insignificant bottleneck, it's utterly absurd to put me on the same level as someone like him who hasn't even grown his hair yet!"

What did the results say? He was first? I was second?

They even used the ridiculous phrase "not completely faded"!

Are those old fogies really that blind? Have their presbyopia grown onto the top of their heads?